Heterodyne

This is a very special release for Type and it’s been a long time coming. I met Arash Moori when we both attended the same Art School in Birmingham in 2000. We quickly realized that we both liked music - I think it was a shared love of To Rococo Rot or Metamatics that sparked the first conversation - and within weeks of meeting each other we were DJing fairly regularly. We kicked off a number of nights in the city, some successful (Default, which birthed the Type label), some not (Left Handers Disco, which confounded punters who didn’t understand how well Kelis mixed with SND). Arash was also kind enough to teach me some production tricks as I was putting together my first album.

In 2002, Arash headed to Finland to continue his art studies, and began to experiment with electricity and light. These experiments informed the direction of ‘Heterodyne’ - I’ve been waiting 13 years for this record. It’s the experimental ‘Chinese Democracy’, except worth the wait.

Over the years, Arash pieced together a deeply personal palette of electrical sounds from strobe lights, fluorescent lights, radios, plasma balls and electronic devices. He exploited the peculiarities of these devices to create harsher and more aggressive sounds. This gave way to a series of live performances using minimal hardware and self built devices to structure, shape and trigger sounds rather than resorting to samples. The computer was an editing device, not a compositional one.

‘Heterodyne’ is the culmination of these experiments. The resulting tracks are far more than academic exercises: Arash has taken years of theory and woven together a spiky collection of coarse techno and disorienting drone. The raw electrical textures and rhythms he spent years collecting are framed by analogue synth pads and oscillators which add contrast and levity. It’s a demanding listen, certainly, but a rewarding one.

This is an album I’ve seen develop for longer than any other and it’s a pleasure to unleash it on the world. Our own collaboration LP (touted for release on City Centre Offices in the early 00s) will never see the light of day, but ‘Heterodyne’ may be one of the most personal record I’ve released on Type to date. Enjoy.